To avoid such situation, you need an analytic framework that prevents consultants to “obfuscate” their code: Everything in your analytical system should be made as transparent as possible, so that maintenance (and bug correction) is straightforward and easy. We designed TIMi such that it’s very difficult to “obfuscate” anything: For example, all data flows within TIMi are easily comprehensible because they are represented as an easy-to-read & visual data-transformation-graph (there are no more thousands of lines of incomprehensible Python/R/Scala codes!).

This means that, if there is a problem in one data flow, any analyst should be able to track and solve it rapidly, without incurring large consultancy costs.

At the end, you can be assured that the consultants that are using TIMi will delivers analytical solutions that are both of very high quality and with a low maintenance cost because having an unethical behavior is nearly impossible when using TIMi as your analytic framework.

As a general rule-of-thumb, our advice is to really avoid working with companies that are both selling (or advising) software and selling consultancy work “per day” afterwards: This really implies too many “conflicts of interests” and “unethical behaviors” (i.e. the more bugs in the installed system, the more days of support they can sell, the more money they’ll get): your wallet will thank us for such an advice!

Since it’s nearly impossible to “obfuscate” anything when using TIMi, you can rest assured that the consultants that are using TIMi have your best interest at heart when it comes to data and process ownership.

TIMi enables you to quickly & directly create exceptional analytical solutions that generates a tremendous amount of value. Forget about years to get an operational data warehouse or months to get a simple dashboard. With TIMi, you can very quickly (e.g. typically, two to six weeks) start from “raw data” and arrive to a working data warehouse or dashboard. And then, you can focus your attention on where it really matters: The extraction of value and knowledge using sophisticated predictive models that you create without any pain, in a few mouse clicks.

But it does not mean that you should stop there, at the first iteration… Inside TIMi, everything is built keeping in mind the idea of “iterative work”. …because we know that an analytical system is never 100% finished. This means that you can easily “upgrade” and “re-work” your analytical system. For example, you can upgrade your data transformation scripts without any pain (this is accomplished through a unique functionality from Anatella: i.e. meta-data-free data-transformations), or rebuilt thousands of predictive models in one mouse click on an “upgraded” analytical dataset (this is accomplished through a unique functionality from TIMi: the Model Factory).

If you want, you can even ask to consultants to create your analytical system with TIMi because any “un-ethical behavior” (such as the creation of thousands of lines of “obfuscated” code to do a simple and mundane task) can easily be detected, reprimanded and avoided.

To summarize, TIMi allows you To boldly go where no data miner has gone before: In a few iteration, you can arrive to a sophisticated, yet easily maintainable and upgradable, analytical system that generates a tremendous amount of value for your company.